When spring convinced Birge’s Corners it had come to stay and housewives mended screens and painted porch steps, and indulged in that blight on civilization, house-cleaning, there came a better, finer understanding between Dan and Lorraine.

Since their New York wedding journey with Thurley Precore’s dÉbut the really great event, there had been a constrained sort of relationship. When two persons admit to themselves they are not happy and it was a mistake to have married, yet are making the best of it and trying to trick the world into thinking them the personification of bliss, the relationship is more hopeless than if each jogs on his own way admitting his discontent and lack of satisfaction. The latter course contains a ray of hope in the fact that systematic deceit and repression have not yet obtained a clutch.

But Dan and Lorraine had returned to the wonderful new house and, in a pathetic, truthful talk, realized that all life stretched before them in unending monotony unless they wished that much dreaded and unusual of happenings in Birge’s Corners—especially for a minister’s daughter—a divorce!

“Perhaps I did wrong to marry you,” Dan said, the first day of their return. “The Birge temper in a new fashion. I wanted to hurt some one else because I was hurt ... a pretty cheap way to do, wasn’t it?”

They were in the living-room where wedding presents were in huddled groups, for Lorraine brooked no interference such as a “settler” to which many brides are subjected. Everything was shiny new, unbecomingly so; the rugs were scarcely adjusted to the slippery floors, there was an air of dampness because the initial furnace fire was scarcely under headway, price marks were still pasted on the electric fixtures, there was something yet to be done with the landing baseboard as there always is something to be done after one has moved into the supposedly most complete house in the world.

No evidence of family life had been introduced into this new and loveless house which was at once the envy and curiosity of the village. Their trunks were unpacked in the front bedroom; the sun parlor waited for Lorraine’s taste in furnishing; a thousand and one details which Dan had dreamed that Thurley would settle with her rapturous enthusiasm now awaited Lorraine’s common sense commands. Lorraine suggested nothing of the girl to Dan; she was a woman, narrow in viewpoint and her comprehensions, pretty in a doll sense, without imagination or artistic taste, some one who would do her share in the hill climbing, who would keep house to the degree of dusting even the tops of the window ledges where no one possibly could look for dust without the aid of a stepladder, but guiltless of exuberance of youth and love of romance.

“I knew you always loved Thurley,” Lorraine answered fearlessly. “You knew I always loved you. If Thurley would not marry you and you asked me in her stead, I felt that you would better be married. You might have done some ugly, cheap things, Dan, if you had not been engaged to me. I love you enough to make myself—content, by keeping your house and having your name. I know I’m not Thurley,” she smiled wistfully, “but I’ll always be Lorraine. Some day you may come to care a little more.”

“Oh, ’Raine, you care as much as that?”

“I can’t say it as I’d like,” was her answer.

Dan had gone over to take her gently in his arms. “I’m not good enough for you,” he mumbled, laying his head on her shoulder for a long, silent moment.

Nothing more was said, no mention made of the wild-rose siren who shadowed their happiness. Each understood life was to go on in even fashion. Lorraine would gain her joy and satisfaction from being Dan’s wife, with the pleasure of possessions; she was born to be a housewife and would have been depressed and useless in any other channel. Dan was born to dominate, to be successful in whatsoever he undertook, tyrannical, aggressive, honest and without fear. Dan would find his peace of mind in his business, more and more engrossed in it each month, in the town’s development. Each impersonally would be able to endure the strain of personal unhappiness.

To be able to entertain all the social clubs in the big, sunny parlors with over-stuffed tapestry furniture, the baby grand player, three parlor lamps, a large engraving of “Daniel in the Lion’s Den,” to say nothing of the American oriental rugs and the mahogany grandfather’s clock that played the Canterbury quarters—that was a genuine satisfaction to Lorraine Birge. True, she would have been more happy as the loved wife of Dan Birge, even had they lived as did his rumored ancestor—a trapper’s roving, wild life. But that not being the case, Lorraine had the convenient ability to transfer her happiness into things, into becoming a hospitable young matron who followed conventional ways with amusing docility.

To have chicken salad made of real chicken and not a hint of veal, coffee with endless whipped cream and loaf sugar, fresh peach ice cream and angel food for the refreshment of her Bible class was a positive joy to Lorraine; to be able to help Mary How, the girl who had been “unfortunate,” was a greater joy; to see that the struggling little church had a new carpet and a leather upholstered chair for the minister, to give a set of new anthems to the choir—such things as these dulled the doubts in her heart.

“She must be happy and he must be glad he married her,” was the consensus of opinion. “She spends as much as a queen and Sunday she had on the fourth new dress since she came home a bride, to say nothing of hats.”

“Dan Birge give her pa an overcoat with real Astrakhan collar and cuffs on it and you never see him now without he’s got a cigar stuck in his mouth—do you think it looks well for a minister? Some say they don’t like it. Lorraine’s got a la va-leer necklace and a bracelet watch and a diamond ring besides her engagement ring and she hires a woman to wash and clean.... She better go slow or the money will build her right up. I remember how she washed every mite of clothes she and her pa had.”

“What about their electric cleaner, that’s pretty high-toned? And she had finger bowls, yes, finger bowls when the out-of-town men took dinner there. Ali Baba says they’re going to buy a seven-passenger car—of course it’s nobody’s business and they certainly do a lot of good but they better be careful or they will find themselves so up in G that there would be no living with them ... my Milly says Dan Birge is going to make his clerks wear black dresses with white collars—now did you ever! I guess Lia Fine and Mercedes Rains won’t. Lia just got herself a red alpaca made with white braid—now what does Dan want to go and do such things for?”

“I dunno, anybody that wanted to marry Thurley Precore is likely to try ’most anything,” the subject here changing to Thurley and her rumored fame, the great event concerning Abby Clergy’s recovery and adoption of Thurley.

So Dan and Lorraine developed a pleasant politeness in their personal relationships as if they had been married a great many years and, perforce, discovered that to be polite was the easiest way to proceed!

Nor would it be quite fair to say that, in time, Dan did not become used to his well ordered home and excellent meals, cooked to please himself first and others afterwards, the even-tempered, pretty wife who always smiled when he smiled and who would absent herself whenever she suspected that he wanted to be alone, to rummage in the den in masculine disorder, using a cushion for his feet as well as his head or to go into the pantry in trail of half a pie and ruthlessly crumb the parlor rugs while he ate it, listening to his favorite rag-time roll on the player piano. Dan was unconscious of the heinous offense committed, because no complaint was ever made. So surely as Lorraine knew that Thurley ruled in her husband’s heart, so surely did Dan rule in Lorraine’s heart, and she had schooled herself in ways of becoming essential to his comfort if not to his affections.

Dan’s clothes were mended, never a rip nor tear nor missing button was in evidence. If he was late for dinner, “It keeps warm so nicely in that jewel of an oven,” or if he ’phoned at the last moment that he would not be home, the telephone operator, June Myers, was forced to report that Lorraine said as sweetly as if she was being asked to a party, “Oh, surely, Dan, I understand—well, have a good time, won’t you?”

“Little mother-drudge” was Ali Baba’s name for her when he and Betsey would argue with Hopeful as to the situation. Hopeful, true to her name, tried to convince herself and every one else that joy reigned in the new house with the iron deer guarding the grass plot, that things were better as they were. But Ali Baba and Betsey gave battle that Thurley was the girl Dan loved and Lorraine was merely making the best of it.

They “went out” as befitted young married people and entertained in turn. But Dan paid no heed to Lorraine’s friends. Perhaps he was conscious of their thoughts. He managed to stay away whenever Lorraine had in “a bunch” and when they attended dancing parties or automobile picnics, he always left the women and drifted with the men to smoke or talk business even when the men would have chosen to play a little.

Dan was determined to keep up the deceit to himself as much as to Lorraine. He gave her all she asked for—but he never thought of a surprise, a reward, a consolation posy when rain prevented a drive or a bruised finger was the result of trying to hammer a nail in straight. None of the tender trifles fell to her lot. And the old, fiery Dan, who was “bound to be hung,” as the village had prophesied, went his way in his own fashion, brooking neither interference nor questioning.

When the new and high-priced talking machine was sent up to the house the day before Christmas, Lorraine had hesitated before she read the titles of the records. She fully expected to see “Sung by Thurley Precore” on the greater share of them. But Dan had chosen with stoic consideration and Thurley’s voice was never recreated to fill their rooms with glorious but unwelcome sound.

Nor did any one mention Thurley to Dan. A few of the old-timers would say when occasion offered, “You got a pretty fine little wife,” and Dan would nod cheerfully and answer,

“Bet I have!” And here the matter ended.

Once, Lorraine’s father, who had wisely chosen to live apart from his son-in-law’s splendor, called on Lorraine during Dan’s absence out of town and said in his slow way,

“Well, my girl, have you anything to tell me?”

Lorraine was engaged in making “over-drapes” for the spare room which was to be in pink. She was the sort who could smother a heartache in making over-drapes and planning color schemes as reflected in candle-shades, braided rugs and embroidered bed-shams.

“Tell you what, father?” she did not look at him.

“Is he happy?” the old man added, which surprised her for she thought he would have asked if she was happy.

“I hope so,” she told him, laying aside the over-drapes.

“You’re a good girl, Lorraine, and you are doing your part. If God sees fit, some day you will be happy, too.”

They said no more about the matter. After he left and Lorraine, like all wives whose husbands are out of town, was eating her cold lunch off the kitchen table, she neglected her meal to wonder about the prophecy. It seemed to her, rank little atheist, that it was not God who was to see fit half as much as a girl named Thurley Precore!

When Dan returned—he had been in New York—she wondered if he had heard Thurley sing and had sent her flowers or tried to see her. As she thanked him for her present, a violet silk sunshade, she wondered if it was a sop to conscience. A cruel regiment of doubts threatened to defeat her loyal resolutions. But she made no comment nor did Dan. They talked of the summer garden, the proposed automobile trip with some other young people, the addition to Dan’s store and the splendid way in which his business was going.

“Don’t, for cat’s sake, take that Spooner girl with us!” Dan said testily, as they returned to the vacation subject. “She hangs around here all the time. What in the world do you see in her anyway?”

“Nothing, but I’m sorry for her, she’s so unhappy.”

“What’s she unhappy about? A great, big, strapping girl who ought to be at work! She makes fudge while her mother irons her dresses, every one says so.”

“Oh, Dan!” pleaded Lorraine.

“Ever since she’s moved here from Pike she has camped on our doorstep. She makes me nervous with that whining voice and that giggle.” Here Dan gave excellent imitations of each. “She rouges like a burlesque actress and dresses her hair in curls.”

“Oh, poor Cora Spooner was terribly in love with an actor. He was in a stock company at Pike and he did encourage her—”

“Tell that to the marines,” Dan said testily, going to the talking machine and putting on a lively band record. “I can’t help that. I notice it didn’t affect her appetite. Why don’t she get a job?”

“Well, there’s nothing in her line here,” Lorraine’s forehead wrinkled anxiously. She was afraid Dan would forbid Cora’s coming to the house, which command would be absolute. Cora Spooner brought a certain zest into Lorraine’s existence. She was a rather handsome girl of twenty-three or four with no intention of working for her living if it could be otherwise arranged. Her mother, whose small pension and capital enabled her to “get along,” was Cora’s chief bugbear. Cora was a bundle of discontent and weird notions, trying to play the bird in the gilded cage rÔle and complain that Birge’s Corners was nothing but a prison. She soon discovered that Lorraine’s car was good to ride about in, her food the best to be had; it was jolly to stay in the pink spare room with the over-drapes and crystal candlesticks instead of her own forlorn cottage. Besides, her mother did not understand her; fancy wanting any one to be a stenographer or school teacher when heaven only knew that Cora was born for romance, adventure! She had a good notion to cut her hair short and masquerade about the country as a boy,—men always had such good times. Cora had had a half dozen beaux who always dropped her after a certain length of time, saying she was “soft” and lazy and her mother ought to make her work, and turning their attentions to plain-faced girls who could cook and who had a little money in the bank!

Cora dressed in the extreme of fashion, badgering Dan for advance style sheets and asking him to order things for her for which she could not pay, wearing them about with a selfconscious mannikin air. When orange silk stockings and white kid boots were the vogue, Cora stepped forth in the most blazing of orange stockings and the snowiest of white kid boots, her skirts just reaching below the knee. When the matter was mentioned to her mother, she said with a weak smirk that Cora was her pa all over again. Every one said if she could have the training she would make a great actress.

Birge’s Corners, having had one genius develop in its humble and unappreciative midst, frowned upon this suggestion—it is not always the most pleasing nor convenient event to have a genius arise from one’s backyard!

“I guess Cora will marry well,” Mrs. Spooner used to say, “so I don’t mind doing the work and keeping her hands white—have you ever noticed them? Dear me, I should think Mrs. Birge would keep a maid instead of slaving so. Cora says she works like a little Turk. They say he has a lot of money.... I wish there were some brothers in his family.”

So Cora went her selfish way, awaiting the arrival of a rich bachelor who was to besiege her with attentions. She used to prey on Lorraine’s sympathy and lack of experience by her tales of being misunderstood and abused. Cora was shrewd in shallow fashion, highly emotional, jealous, small-minded and given to extreme views of anything which happened to appeal to her for the moment. She was a bad asset to the village since she could arouse discontent and rebellion quickly among her associates. She had a way of unsettling every one and then withdrawing from the situation without leaving a solution.

The neighbors said she raged and fought with her mother over the question of money and that she always came out victor. In public, she was devotion itself, although she was ashamed of her mother’s appearance and managed to keep her in the house most of the time. “Mamma has heart trouble” was her tender explanation, although mamma was probably ironing ruffled petticoats or cleaning white kid boots at the very moment Cora pensively explained the maternal maladies!

Lorraine regarded Cora as a story-book sort of person, marvelling at her daring and style. Cora openly had tried to bewitch Dan and, being curtly shown she was of no more consequence than Mr. Toots, began systematically and painstakingly to “knock” him to every one except his wife.

“Poor little Lorraine—little slave, she is—I go to see her because I’m so sorry for her, yes, he’s terribly mean—oh, awful! I’ve heard some things, but of course it wouldn’t be right to repeat them,” and so on, all the time borrowing Lorraine’s pin money and eating up her dinners, riding in her car and making Lorraine introduce her to every man, married or unmarried, who stopped over in the village long enough to visit the Birges.

Lorraine did not press the matter of taking Cora on the vacation, although Cora had managed to invite herself!

“There is melancholia in our family,” she told Lorraine. “Oh, yes, several suicides—terrible, isn’t it? I try not to brood but I am a daughter of the sun, I crave love and life. How could I be content in this pokey place? Oh, Lorraine, I look upon you as a sister—do be good to me,” at which Lorraine’s gullible little self would be utterly won over and she would bake Cora’s favorite cake and make her a crÊpe de chine waist and ask over, braving Dan’s wrath, some drummer who might be in search of a wife as well as a buyer for his dustless mops!

But there was another person who had come into The Corners since Thurley had left it and whom Dan regarded as every one’s enemy. He had said publicly that it was a patriotic duty to have this person, Owen Pringle, although he spelled it Oweyne and had a book plate, shot at sunrise, velvet smoking-jacket, hair parted in the middle and all!

As the record ended, Dan flung himself on the sofa, remarking, “I wish Cora and Owen would get married—ye gods, do you get it?” He chuckled. “I’d hand them a chest of small silver if they did. How about it—can’t you get Owen interested?”

“Oh, Cora wouldn’t consider him,” Lorraine said seriously.

Dan chuckled more than ever. “If you had a sense of humor, you’d have a lot of fun, but you take these people at face value. Now Owen clerked for me a month and disorganized the whole shop. I’ll tell you right now that unless he cuts out his nonsense and goes back to the livery stable from which he sprang, I’m going to get him away from here.”

“But his shop is artistic,” Lorraine murmured.

At which Dan tossed a sofa pillow good-naturedly her way. He proceeded, in his slangy fashion, to tell her that this Owen Pringle who had appeared from nowhere some months before and tried his best to create a real, true leisure class in the village was nothing short of several kinds of a fool; that when a full-grown man with apparently nothing the matter with him tries to make his living by starting a shop and spelling it shoppe, and has a wistaria tea room and an art department where you purchase impossible penwipers made of cherry-colored silk, baby bootees and old ladies’ knitted throws, smart Christmas cards telling about everything but Christmas, and writing paper that resembled butchers’ wrappings, as well as crazy old wooden stuff painted bright red and green and labelled “window ledges” or “door stops” and, horror of horrors, a millinery department which this Oweyne conducted himself, making hats resembling Weber and Fields,—it is time to employ violence! But this was not the worst of his offenses. Oh, no—he had tried to organize a country club and persuade hard-working, honest men to play golf instead of raising potatoes and instituted the polo craze, thereby demoralizing all the decent, well-broken delivery horses in the township. He lived at Dan’s old suite at the Hotel Button and gave chafing-dish parties and thought up smart sayings ahead of time. He wanted to organize a stock company and play “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” but Cora Spooner and June Meyers were the only two who had out and out joined, so the project was abandoned “for lack of funds and interest.”

Owen always wore Palm Beach suits and hats draped with Roman scarfs. He was given to a dash of garlic in his salad dressing, believed the dead returned, read French novels and was undeniably seen sitting in the window of his shoppe sewing maline on hat frames and actually trying them on himself for the effect.

At first he was a novelty, but since tea and nasturtium-leaf sandwiches do not appeal to the male population, only females clustered together in his shoppe and bought his nonsense or defended him.

Owen, too, had speedily discovered the advantage of having Mrs. Daniel Birge as a patroness. Despite Dan’s ridicule, she came to the shoppe to buy a hat and thus set the stride for the younger set, while Owen managed to be invited to dinner and to be present on the most interesting of the automobile trips.

“As a member of the idle rich, Owen would have shone,” concluded Dan, “but in life his best getaway would be to become president of the Erie Canal.” Then seeing Lorraine’s real confusion, he said good-naturedly, “If they amuse you, go on, honey, drag the whole lot up here—you have to listen to them,” drifting into an unsociable nap and leaving Lorraine occupied with her thoughts.

Dan’s other two particular pests and Lorraine’s friends were Josie Donaldson and Hazel Mitchell. Josie Donaldson’s father was next to Dan the richest man in the village and Josie the natural and fearful result of being the only child of such a plutocrat.

She was a precocious young person with the boast that she could do anything she set out to do, if she could do it her way, backed up by admiring throngs of relatives. She had framed the first dollar bill she ever earned (?) for some minor service in her father’s hardware store, had worn the patience of the newspaper editors to a thread by asking for a job as a reporter only to take a few days off, after she was hired, to give a party or write a new poem. Dan called her poems “Josie’s dope,” as they appeared from time to time in a box border with the heading, “Birge’s Corners’ Muse.”

There were many familiar phrases in these poems which increased in number as time went on, but being Josie Donaldson’s, they were passed without question and editor after editor would warn his new and optimistic successor, “When that Donaldson girl comes in here for a job just tie the can on from the start. It is cheap at half the price to be rid of her. You’ll know her. She’s fat and dresses like a circus rider, carries a bolt of baby ribbon around so as to tie up any poems she may happen to write en route. She’ll cry if you correct her spelling and she was never known to get any one’s initials right in her life, not even her own family’s. Fudge ought to be her life work. She’s made love to every fellow in the burg and, when they escape, she wants to start a backbiting contest in the paper. Her pa and ma think Josie is one, two, three, all right, and they have enlarged photographs of her at every stage—from writhing on the fur rug clad in a smile to her graduating dress clasping the valedictory essay. She writes her father’s ads and I’m darned if I can tell whether he wants to run a special sale of sprinkling cans at seventy-nine cents per or whether hell’s broken loose in Hoboken! Don’t let her get across—not even for a week or you’ll have galloping brain fever.”

Josie also attached herself to Lorraine, who read her poems and made her fudge galore. She told Lorraine her troubles, that a girl with brains, and particularly a girl with literary ability, was never popular with boys; they wanted silly, little wasp-waisted dolls and she was just too hurt for words—so there.

Lorraine was also sorry for Josie and she let her ravage her sugar barrel and pile on to her best chaise longue to lie and pout and eat candy, trying to find a new word to rhyme with “death.”

The other offender was Dan’s own stenographer, Hazel Mitchell. Dan, who looked upon the world with a larger vision than did most of the Corners, had a contempt and lack of interest in Lorraine’s “grafters.” Had he loved Lorraine as he had loved Thurley there would have been many a battle on the subject until he had shown Lorraine the broader vision and comprehension. As it was, he was content to let well enough alone, unless he was called upon to entertain the “grafters” and endure their chatter.

Hazel Mitchell was a slender, wan-eyed girl—“moon face” was Dan’s considerate name for her. She was, so he said, eternally recombing her hair when he wanted to give some dictation and always feeling whether or not her waist and skirt were properly interlocked, or running off to visit the male clerk in the men’s furnishings or “just slipping” up to Owen Pringle’s shoppe to try on a new hat!

Hazel operated her actions on the theory that “pity is akin to love” and if she could make every one sufficiently sorry for her the day was won. This she managed to do with less consideration for the truth and the common sense of her audience than one might have suspected.

“Oh, I never listen to her yarns,” Dan told Lorraine, when Lorraine asked if he did not feel sorry for Hazel who had a brutal, drunken father and whose mother with eight children younger than Hazel never had a kind word for the girl, but expected her to come right straight home from work and start tending the babies. “If there was any one else in this town I could hire, I’d do it without hesitation. But if I let her go, Josie Donaldson would want the place or else Cora Spooner, and Hazel is a mild sort of fool. How can she cry all the time and not get granulated lids?” he ended irritably. “She blots her dictation pad for fair.”

“She says they have nothing elevating in their home and she craves better things,” repeated little Lorraine.

“Oh, yes, she does—she wants a duke to drop out of the clouds and swoop her up and a lot she cares if her whole family starve to death. I don’t blame her father for his morning’s morning, if he has to listen to her, and she spends all her money on herself, turning it right into the store for nonsense. Her spare time she spends in Owen Pringle’s boudoir,” Dan’s eyes twinkled, “learning how to be one of the idle rich on eight per! Oh, ’Raine, ask old Ali Baba up for supper—I want to know how it feels to have somebody with sense as a guest.”

“But it’s a real joy for the girls to come here—”

Here Dan betrayed more insight into Lorraine’s life than she fancied he possessed. “It was never a joy for them to come and see you when you lived at the parsonage, scrubbing and cooking and mending! I never saw Josie Donaldson rolling up her sleeves to give you a lift or Hazel Mitchell hanging about until she was asked inside. It was no joy then. They beat it the other way when they saw you coming—”

He spied a tear in Lorraine’s gentle eyes. So he humbly added, “Never mind my growls, do as you like—you don’t dictate to me about the grafters I take to lunch or driving, do you?”

Lorraine did not answer; she was thinking that Dan, too, was quite in the same category. Dan had never had any “joy” in seeing Lorraine until Thurley had gone away. Dan was no different in some respects from the others!

Before the vacation occurred, with Owen, Josie and Cora as the guests, Lorraine rummaged in Dan’s chiffonier to find extra goggles for Cora and a linen motor coat for Owen. She came upon a magazine lying face downward.

She understood why it was almost hidden, for it was a recent issue of a musical journal and the cover page was a brilliant color reproduction of a photograph of Thurley Precore as AÏda, glowing praise briefly written underneath. Thurley wore a mesh of lace studded with brilliants; she half reclined on a divan, like some legendary queen dreaming in the blue-black night!

Lorraine did not know how long she had been crouching on the floor as if she were a child discovering hidden Christmas presents. Dan came in and, bending down, gently took the magazine away. Lorraine started up. She realized the contrast between the photograph and herself far more than Dan—since Dan only realized Thurley. Her bungalow apron over a pink house dress, her heelless slippers, her unpowdered, flushed face—and that gorgeous, super-person smiling out so temptingly at them both!

“’Raine, do you mind—just having the picture?” he asked with none of his customary aggression.

“Why, no—of course not.” She was glad to make her escape.

That night Dan brought his wife some roses and told her she had on a becoming dress; he was glad Cora Spooner was to be Owen’s clerk—after all, it took all kinds of fools to make a world.

And on the same night Thurley, closing her season, received among other offerings a handsome basket of orchids and lilies tied with silvery tulle. The card said, “From an old friend.”